Feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian has debuted the first video in her new series, Positive Female Characters, where she examines examples of video games getting feminism right.

This premiere episode focuses on the player character in Capybara Games' 2011 adventure Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, a game we rather liked.

"This episode examines how Sword & Sworcery employs widely recognisable action adventure game tropes to make the Scythian's quest feel like the stuff of video game legend, and how in doing so, it asserts that women can fill the role of the mythic hero as effectively as men can," stated Sarkeesian in her video description.

Surprise! Assassin's Creed: Chronicles is now three games instead of one.

The previously-announced Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China, a side-scrolling action platformer developed by UK studio Climax, has now been revealed as just the first of three standalone downloadable episodes.

The mini-series' China episode will debut first on 22nd April (21st April in the US) and star Ming Dynasty-era assassin Shao Jun, after her meeting with Ezio in spin-off animation Assassin's Creed: Embers.

If you'd pegged Ironcast as one of those puzzle games that dresses itself up as strategy, you've got it the wrong way round. This is a strategy game - and a surprisingly fiendish one - that has donned the friendly clothing of a simple match-three timewaster. More than that, it's also a roguelike - or a roguelite, anyway, if you're happy to allow that word to exist. Whatever, it's the genuine article, with all the suffering that comes from a stat-wiping defeat, and all the anguish that builds as you ponder your next fateful decision.

And this is good news. Roguelikes and their ilk can make you feel pretty weak and feeble, but when the tumblers spin in your favour, they can turn you into a god. Take a humdrum sortie to Canterbury the other day. A loot drop went my way and instead of the normal common clobber, I was left with a rare missile launcher that does, on average, 198 points of damage per turn. I clamped it on back at the hangar, and did what came naturally: I headed to Croydon. Another humdrum sortie, of course, but this time enemies were coming apart in two blasts from that missile launcher, each pull on the trigger lofting a fat missile into the air. The thud! Oh, you never heard such a thud. And I never had such luck on a loot drop. I felt almost guilty, except I knew how long it would be before another drop went so thoroughly in my favour. Five hours of playing, and this had been my only rare.

Except right there in Croydon, I got another one. A rare energy beam, doing, on average, a sizzling 192! With weapons that tackled both the hulls of my enemies and the shields, I suddenly had all of my bases covered. Roguelikes, eh? (I died in Haslemere shortly afterwards.)

If Towerfall, Nidhogg and Samurai Gunn have taught me anything, it's that sometimes the simplest premises are the best. A multitude of game modes, complex move-sets and single-player campaigns are all well and good for our Halos, Street Fighters and Monster Hunters, but sometimes all you need is one brilliant idea well executed. That's what Vogelsap's The Flock is attempting to do with asymmetrical five-player multiplayer. And based on my time with it at GDC, it seems well on its way to delivering.

On the surface The Flock seems similar to Evolve with its four-on-one monster versus human(oid) game mechanic, but it's actually closer to a multiplayer take on Alien: Isolation. Unlike Evolve, in The Flock, you've got four monsters and only one human(oid). However, your role - and species, for that matter - changes throughout each match.

Initially everyone spawns as these alien gargoyles called The Flock. You all have the same goal: activate a series of light orbs with a magical flashlight. The problem is that whoever wields this flashlight, dubbed the Light Artifact, transforms into a humanoid being called the Carrier. The Carrier is weak. All they can do is walk and shine their light around. Thankfully, this Light Artifact's beam can instantly fry any Flock it illuminates. Fail to protect the Light Artifact and you'll respawn as another Flock while your killer now bears the torch.

Star Wars Pinball developer Zen Studios has revealed its next table based on Star Wars Rebels.

Due on the week of 27th April for Zen's stable of pinball series - including Pinball FX2, Zen Pinball 2, and Star Wars Pinball - this upcoming table will be based on Disney XD's animated TV series. As such, it will encompass seven missions that include the show's roster of characters and vehicles with fully-animated TIE fighters and the starship Ghost.

Back in 2013 Zen Studios wowed Eurogamer contributor Rich Stanton with its Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back table. "It seems ludicrous to say it about a pinball table, but this feels inextricable from the universe, its elements combining into something truly evocative," he wrote in his glowing Star Wars Pinball: The Empire Strikes Back review.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1746007Tue, 31 Mar 2015 01:15:00 +0100Woah Dave! will secretly be free for PS Plus members in April

Minimalist score-chasing platformer Woah Dave! will secretly be free in April for PlayStation Plus subscribers.

What we mean by secretly is that it won't officially be part of next month's Instant Game Collection, so you'll have to search for it separately - a tip unveiled on the PlayStation Blogcast.

This cool freebie was later confirmed for Europe by developer Choice Provisions, the new name of bit.trip studio Gaijin Games.

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin has been priced on PC, both as a standalone package and as an upgrade for existing players.

So here's how it shakes down: There are two versions of Scholar of the First Sin on PC; one on DirectX9 and the other on DirectX11. The former is the existing version of the game with all its DLC, while the latter is basically the equivalent of the PS4 and Xbox One versions with all the new graphical updates and content that entails.

This means the DirectX11 version adds new enemy placements, fiercer foe AI, six-player multiplayer (upped from four), new weapons and armour, and the whole thing will just look nicer.

It's usually a good sign when a game opens with scientists muffing things up, leading to disaster. That's how Half Life began, of course, and if you go further back it's also how Another World opens. Trace, the peculiarly named hero of Axiom Verge, is very much in that mould.

His vague experiment leads to an accident which seemingly kills him - except he awakes in a strange new world that, it must be said, looks a lot like a NES game. A mysterious female voice gets him up and moving, and before you know it he's acquired the first of many weapons and is hopping from platform to platform, blasting the weird biomechanical creatures that want to do him in, and trying to find his way back to normality.

In case you haven't guessed from the screenshots, Axiom Verge is a Metroidvania game, that hybrid genre where traditional linear platforming gets shaken up by an ever-expanding suite of gadgets and abilities, each of which allows you to bypass obstacles or access areas that had previously been off limits. The longer you play, the more of the map you can explore.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1745794Mon, 30 Mar 2015 13:00:00 +0100Headteachers threaten to report parents who let their children play 18-rated games

A headteachers group has threatened to report parents who let their children play 18-rated games to the police and social services for neglect.

Nantwich Education Partnership, a group of 14 primary and two secondary schools in Cheshire, wrote to parents last month after finding some children had been playing the likes of Grand Theft Auto, Gears of War and Call of Duty.

"If your child is allowed to have inappropriate access to any game or associated product that is designated 18+, we are advised to contact the police and children's social care as this is deemed neglectful," the letter read.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1745850Mon, 30 Mar 2015 11:43:00 +0100The PC version of Dead or Alive 5 Last Round launches on Steam without key features

The PC version of fighting game Dead or Alive 5 Last Round launches today on Steam without a number of key features.

In its announcement, publisher Koei Tecmo pointed to the PC version's support for resolutions up to 4K as well as antialiasing compatibility.

But the PC version does not include online multiplayer. This is expected to arrive in the form of a patch "within three months following the game's release", Koei Tecmo said. Until then, the game is discounted 10 per cent. It costs £26.99, down from £29.99.

If you've played much of Captain Forever, you'll know that it can be hard to say exactly when a design starts to come together. Jarrad "Farbs" Woods' gloriously stark browser game blends creation and destruction from the moment you first load it up. This is a game about building spaceships by blasting other spaceships to pieces. Once a battle's finished, you switch from a soldier to a scavenger, an engineer, rooting through the wreckage and clamping anything useful you find onto your chassis. Ten minutes in, your craft will likely be a true beast of the cosmos. But the design of that craft? How does it start? Who really shapes it? Hard to say. Hard to say.

Fitting, then, that when I ask how Captain Forever Remix came about, nobody can provide an answer. "The idea was really an accident," says designer Dean Tate eventually. "It wasn't my idea. Or Brian's. Or Jarrad's."

Brian is Brian Chan, Tate's co-designer on Remix. The pair met at Harmonix, although they were on different teams back then. Tate's worked on games like BioShock 1 and 2, and he lead the design on Dance Central. Chan's been involved with Plants vs Zombies and Pandemic's Mercenaries games. Eventually, they tired of working in big organisations and decided to go indie. But how?

Butt Sniffin Pugs is a game about smelling canine bums. But it's about so much more than that. It's about peeing. And pooping. And barking. And biting. In short: it's a game about being a dog.

Shown off at GDC with a bizarre giant tennis ball/pug bottom controller (more on that later), SpaceBeagles' Butt Sniffin Pugs transcends vanilla concepts like good or bad, or smart or stupid.

Like Noby Noby Boy before it, there are no concrete goals in Butt Sniffin Pugs. You merely frolic about interacting with the scenery. But unlike Keita Takahashi's cult classic, Butt Sniffin Pugs can be played with two players.

Nearly a year ago I stood on a roof terrace in an unbelievable location, surrounded by icy blue seas and snowy mountains, breathing crisp Arctic air - and I was getting an absolute roasting. At that moment in time I didn't want to be in Iceland anymore. I didn't want to be at the Harpa building for Eve FanFest 2014 anymore. And I sure as hell didn't want to be talking to Alexander bloody Gianturco anymore.

I'd felt pretty confident going up to him. I hadn't played Eve Online - a persistent universe of intrigue, economics, and spaceships - but I'd written about it. I'd written about it enough to know who Gianturco was, certainly: a man better known by his character's name, The Mittani, and probably the most famous character in the game. I hoped he had read some of my work and had seen that I cared. He had read my stuff, it turned out, but that was the problem. He accused me of writing rubbish about him because I hadn't made an effort to really understand Eve.

It hurt. I stood my ground and things worked out but the confrontation had upset me. What a wicked, arrogant space emperor, I thought. What gives him the right to make me feel bad? What does he matter anyway?! He's just some guy in a game - why should I care what he thinks?

2K Games is offering huge discounts on several of its biggest hits on the Humble Store, with some titles up to 83 per cent off.

Better yet, Spec Ops: The Line comes free with any purchase. So if you snag Sid Meier's Civilization Complete for £0.74 / $1.24, you'll still get Spec Ops with it. Nevermind that this makes purchasing Spec Ops on its own completely redundant.

The folks behind Infestation: Survivor Stories (aka the game previously known as The War Z before it changed names due to a trademark issue) is rebooting its zombie MMO with a new game called Romero's Aftermath.

That Romero in the title isn't Doom co-creator John Romero, nor is it Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero, but it is his son, George Cameron Romero. "He's going to join production team as a creative force to help us make the ultimate zombie experience," the developer said on its official forum. "Cameron, being an avid hardcore gamer will be a great partner for us. He brings not only his creative vision and film experience, but also his family's heritage in the zombie genre. Cameron will help us create a world that is more 'authentic' than the one we had before."

So what is Aftermath, exactly? Developer Free Reign East calls it the "spiritual successor" to Infestation, yet it's technically a new IP due to the developer's separation from its partner company. "The development team behind Infestation wanted to create a new experience for Infestation/WarZ players making sure to keep best parts of the game that made it popular, while avoiding controversial decisions and plain stupid mistakes that were previously made," Free Reign East explained. "Unfortunately, it was impossible to make the modifications to the existing game under the partnership with Infestation's publisher - OP Productions LLC. We had to leave and start from scratch."

As of 25th February, Failbetter's Victorian Gothic storytelling curio had sold 100,000 copies.

In a post on the Failbetter website, analyst Adam Myers said before development began the London-based independent studio had estimated Sunless Sea would sell anything from 5000 copies at worst to 50,000 at best.

The €500,000 Make Arma Not War competition - designed to find the best Arma 3 mods around - has come to an end, and the winners have been announced.

Grand prize - a staggering €200,000 - goes to Total Modification RHS: Escalation. "Expand your Arma 3 experience with highly detailed and realistic Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and United States Armed Forces," reads its blurb. "This mod brings contemporary warfare between the world's superpowers to the next level."

It brings new vehicles, infantry and gear to the game, plus enhanced gameplay realism. RHS: Escalation, like the other mods, is free to download and play now.

With the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One version of Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, The Bard's Tale 4 and possibly, probably even more games in the works, inXile Entertainment has a lot on its plate.

Or should that be, a lot of plates on its table. For founder Brian Fargo, it's a case of keeping them all spinning - no mean feat for a lean, 30-something person California studio.

Let's take things one step at a time, as inXile does. Brian Fargo tells me Wasteland 2 project lead Chris Keenan has promised him the recently-announced console versions will be out "late summer". I can hear Chris laugh over Skype when Brian mentions this vague launch window, but they're serious about it. And they've said it, now, on the record. And I've put it on the internet. So it has to happen.

Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition has finally arrived on Steam as part of the game's conversion from Games For Windows Live, Capcom has announced.

If you have just regular Resident Evil 5 on Steam or GFWL, you can upgrade to the Gold Edition content for £11.99 / $14.99. That includes all the DLC released up to that point including a versus mode, four new costumes, Mercenaries Reunion, and two new story chapters: Lost in Nightmares and Desperate Escape.

If you don't own the game, you can purchase RE5: Gold Edition for £22.99 / $29.99 , though it's currently on sale for £16.09 / $20.99 until 30th March.

UPDATE 26/03/2014 6.56pm: The first trailer for Halo Online has been released. It looks a little something like this:

As you can see at the 1.27 mark, there appears to be micro-transactions where you can purchase equipment with in-game currency, or purchase in-game currency with real money. As such, it seems to have adopted the contentious "pay-to-win" model.

According to a translation on Reddit, a couple of the subtitles read, "Create a unique Spartan" and "Select original weapons and armour."

Between now and Monday at 5pm GMT, loads of Sega game are heavily discounted on Valve's distribution portal with Alien: Isolation a spiffy 75 per cent off, making it a mere £7.99.

Also of note is the Sega Bundle, an anthology of 93 Sega titles, is a whopping 92 per cent off what each title would add up to individually, bringing the collection to a mere £59.99. That's not bad for an anthology that contains Valkyria Chronicles, Company of Heroes (1 & 2), Total War: Rome 2, Total War: Shogun 2, Binary Domain, Alpha Protocol, Hell Yeah!, and many, many more.

EA has explained why one Battlefield Hardline player was locked out of playing the cops vs. criminals shooter after benchmarking a number of graphics cards.

Games blogger Hilbert Hagedoorn initially suspected Visceral's FPS contained "ghastly DRM" that had blocked him from playing after five changes to his own hardware.

"Here's what EA's DRM is doing," he wrote. "EA doesn't just verify the number of PCs you work on slash use, nope... they dare to monitor hardware changes inside your PC now, which I am sure is a privacy breach on many levels."

Its final tally was $1,766,205, which is more than twice its original $800,000 goal. It also makes it the 15th most funded video game on Kickstarter ever. With PayPal donations, which will continue to roll in, the total is up at $1,783,796.

But now, with a service like Steam, the time is right for a comeback. Football Manager developer Sports Interactive has announced that Eastside Hockey Manager will return. Today!

At 6pm GMT, Eastside Hockey Manager: Early Access will launch on Steam. No price has been confirmed, "But it will be cheaper than our games normally are," said studio director Miles Jacobson in an interview with The Blue Line. The game will also be cheaper while it's an Early Access release.

Easily the best thing about all these old-school RPG revivals has been remembering just how varied the classics truly were. Divinity Original Sin brought back the Ultima VII vibe, Wasteland 2 carried as much of Fallout as it did its namesake, and now Pillars of Eternity casts its resurrection spell on the classic that largely saved the genre from a descent into obscurity - Silver! No, wait. That other one. Baldur's Gate, that's it.

Pillars of Eternity isn't Baldur's Gate 3, but only because of a few technicalities like the name. Its new world is distinct from Forgotten Realms in detail rather than spirit, its engine and mechanics are patterned almost entirely after what BioWare and Black Isle were doing with the Infinity Engine back in the 90s. The backgrounds, higher resolution and with nicer effects, but cut from the same cloth. Each Act beginning with a portentous narrated text scroll. The map. The assassins out for your blood. The progression through small towns suffering from a background threat (this time to children rather than iron) before entering a big city of politics and intrigue. To be sure, you can find the individual elements there in many RPGs, but in this case the particular mix leaves no doubt as to what you're supposed to be feeling nostalgic about. And if any doubt persists, it's soon beaten over the head with the magic words "You must gather your party before venturing forth."

Occasionally, that can be a mite underwhelming. Part of what made Pillars' inspirations classics is that for their time, they were scrappy, adventurous, forging new terrain. The same has always gone for Obsidian's designs, being noted for their subversions and risk-taking and willingness to try spinning things in new directions even with existing franchises. Pillars of Eternity however, while ambitious, plays things very, very safe. It's absolutely the game that Obsidian's Kickstarter backers wanted and paid for, just lacking the company's usual flair for also giving us what we didn't know we wanted, or even the shake-ups to the formula supposedly made for the originally planned Baldur's Gate 3: The Black Hound. At times, it almost seems to pull away from its own twists. The occasional breaks from the action for Choose Your Own Adventure style storylets for instance sounded like a great idea for handling more complex encounters than the engine can offer, but in practice are typically "Try throwing a grappling hook? Okay, cool, it worked." I really wanted more of these, and more ambitious ones. The few that stand out really show their potential.

UPDATE 03/26/2015 12.27am: Toejam and Earl: Back in the Groove has successfully hit its $400K Kickstarter goal with two days to go.

The crowdfunded sequel has currently raised $415,336, though it still has some stretch goals to shoot for.

At $425K, developer Humanature will add oldschool skins for the titular duo; at $450K the Hyperfunk Zone from TJ&E 2 will be added; $500K will fund more playable characters; and $500K adds new guest composers.